Borderline
by lollypopGuild-UK
Summary: HLV disregarded. Can one man save a whole city? Is the threat of terrorism real or is it all in his head? Choices once made come back to haunt the man that is London's (and Molly's) only hope. Sherlock is too broken to do it on his own, but the stakes are so much higher for John now there's a baby on the way. WARNING war, blood, swearing, sexual assault, drug abuse and Sherlolly.
1. Chapter 1

**AN - Hello everyone, **

**I do not own Sherlock. Apparently the BBC do (drat). If I did own him, I would waste no time in coating him in chocolate... but that's another story!**

**The intro music for this episode is 'Unknown Soldier' by Breaking Benjamin. Open another tab and listen to it as you read this chapter. **

** www. you tube watch? v=aCtE7WcUqM0**

* * *

**BORDERLINE**

** Chapter One**

_"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, _

_the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; _

_they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."_

Earnest Hemingway.

* * *

His bladder was full and the endless bumps and stones in the road only added to the discomfort of an already tense journey. Barren scrubland passed by the tiny, dirty bulletproof window and the monotonous landscape was only interrupted by the occasional piece of debris. They were the depressingly familiar signs of a divided civilisation, but out here those plastic bags and corroded bits of roofing could have a much more sinister meaning. They could be hiding anything. Eight weeks to go and then he could swap the danger and heat and dust for the good old English countryside and crumpets. God he missed crumpets, oozing with yellow butter and just a little bit burnt around the edges. Thinking about food always kept him going. It'd probably be tinned Irish stew for dinner in the mess tonight. Or those ramen noodles that his sister often put in his care packages. They were coming less frequently now; she had her own problems.

"You should have seen it," said Jiménez.

Snapping out of his reverie, Watson looked across the interior of the armoured vehicle at Corporal Jiménez, tuning in to the other soldiers' conversation.

"Blood spurting everywhere, and all for a souvenir. Yeah, idiot thought he'd try and make a key-ring out of a live round. Put it on a bench, hit it with a hammer and… BAM! No more left pinky."

Watson gave him a look that said _enough stories about losing toes, bad for morale_.

Jiménez sank back against the wall, tail between his legs. "Well, guy was a pro anyway. He'll be going home without ever seeing battle."

"Take two paracetamol, and come and see me in the morning," smirked Phelps.

Watson couldn't help smiling at that.

And then… he wasn't really sure what happened next. There was a real life BAM! And his ears were ringing and he'd been thrown out of the vehicle and there was smoke and dust rising up all around him and faces looking shocked and limbs not attached to people and his face was hitting the road and his right leg hurt _Oh My God my leg hurts_…

Then his training kicked in. Watson's head snapped around, trying to assess the situation properly. He flipped onto his back and patted down his body armour. Okay, he was stunned and winded and shrapnel had torn through his calf but he was otherwise uninjured. He would still be able to help the injured. _The injured… where are the injured?_

He could see the back door of the vehicle swinging off its hinges with smoke billowing out and shapes moving inside. _Must get back..._ but then he stopped himself; there could me more IEDs under the road.

_Shit…_ a hail of bullets ripped into the convoy and the shouting began. There was about fifteen meters of bare road between him the vehicle full of injured soldiers. He watched Jiménez shake the stars out of his head, leap up to man the machine gun on the roof and promptly crumple to the floor, his legs useless. Phelps pulled himself up to take his place only to hit the deck when his shattered tibias failed him. Each man in the vehicle attempted to return fire, sustained only by the adrenaline in their veins, unaware of their own hideous wounds, and then fell like jelly.

He had no choice. He commando-crawled towards the vehicle, which he could now see, was savagely ripped open like a can full of people. Bullets hit the road all around him as the insurgents closed in on their ambush. The rest of the convoy scrambled their vehicles to form a defensive semi-circle, the personnel consumed with the battle. Ignoring the pain in his leg, Watson dragged himself into the cab. Drake, the driver, was unconscious, slumped on the steering wheel, probably knocked out upon impact. He took the woman's pulse and checked her legs, applying a pressure pad to an oozing gash. She would live. She would walk again. He moved on to the back of the vehicle, gasping at the carnage he found there, and felt around for some of the medical supplies they'd been carrying. Dust and fresh smoke still hung in the air. Phelps lay weeping on top of Jiménez, both of their boots were totally shredded, bone and curiously dark clots of blood mangled with the leather.

Phelps just kept repeating, "da-fuq… da-fuq…"

"Breathe, mate. Help is coming. Here, hold this." Watson applied field dressings from his pack. It was a woefully inadequate treatment. Then he turned his attention to Gibbs. Already dead. Underneath Gibbs was Sotelo. His trousers had been blown off by the blast and his dark flesh gave way to shreds where his lower legs had once been, but somehow he was still conscious. Watson steeled himself and dragged Gibbs' lifeless body off his patient. Meanwhile Jiménez reached for the radio, grimacing as the adrenaline could no longer mask the pain.

Sotelo was in a bad way, his blood pressure dropping rapidly, so Watson moved quickly to stem the bleeding and get an IV in. He was reeling from his own blood loss now, his head cloudy. The only sound now was the ping of enemy fire hitting the vehicle and the pop-pop of her majesty's royal army doing their best to blow them off the face of the planet. He prayed for the sound of the helicopter. They needed a med-evac… Now. but he wouldn't let sotelo know how bad it really was.

"Just a flesh wound," he joked, as Sotelo drifted in and out, "you'll be up and about in no time."

It was then that it bit him. Watson had never been bitten by a snake, but this was how he imagined it would feel; a hot searing stab in the shoulder. How would a snake manage to bite him in the shoulder? _No it wasn't a snake, was it?_ His mind struggled to reason properly within his state of shock.

_It was a bullet._

A bullet that had whizzed through the gaping back door, burst the IV bag he was holding and ripped into his left shoulder, shattering the scapula and grazing the subclavian artery on its way through. Watson had treated men with similar injuries. He knew that meant he would lose blood quickly.

_Shit._ The floor, slick with other men's blood, started to rise up deliriously. He was falling. Falling and cursing and struggling to make sense of all that was around him; the heat and the dust and the smoke… the wrecked vehicle… only eight weeks to go… oozing butter… oozing blood… the injured men's faces… Phelps with soot under his eyes, pleading into the radio… faces spinning to the sound of the helicopter… Drake… Jiménez… Gibbs… Sotelo… Watson… Sherlock…

_Wait, what the fuck? Sherlock?_

"HO!" John jolted awake, the bedroom coming once more into focus.

Mary stirred beside him. "Bad dreams again?"

The grey light of dawn crept through the window as the paralysis of sleep began to leave him. John found his voice, "I, I... it's fine. Nothing to worry about."

She rolled over and stroked his face tenderly. "I do worry. It's my job to worry about you."

"I think I'll get straight in the shower." He was drenched. Oh-five hundred said the alarm clock. "You have a lie-in," he said, getting up, kissing her closed eyes, "if you want."

"I want." Mary lazily continued her roll into his part of the bed, where it was still warm with his scent.

"I'll bring you breakfast in bed." Somewhere deep down John found a cheery attitude to go with the voice.

"Crumpets?" she asked, eyes still closed.

"Crumpets."


	2. Chapter 2

**AN - Thank's to everyone who's made me feel amazingly welcome here! It's nice to be part of an active fandom again.**

* * *

Chapter Two

Jane Doe didn't flinch when the scalpel went in. She didn't flinch when the power saw went through her skull. Jane Doe would never feel anything again, but she must have felt pain when her torturer made that incision in her leg. A very regular incision about the size of a letterbox, running the length of the inner thigh. The blood vessels around the edge had been cauterised. It had been stitched together at one point, but then opened up again close to the time of death. It had all the hallmarks of a surgery but nothing had been removed. That, together with the imprecise cutting technique, pointed to either the worst surgeon in the world or a drunk one.

The young woman had walked into the minor injuries department seventy-two hours ago and dropped dead in the waiting room before even being triaged. When the alarming incision had been discovered, the coroner had been called and a postmortem ordered. She was of Eastern European descent. She had no identification. The incision hadn't killed her, so what did? Her stomach contents turned up nothing. Her blood was clean. There were signs of recent sexual activity, so maybe they had a fetishist on their hands. Maybe it was another serial killer. Or maybe it was a serial unlicensed cosmetic surgeon.

"Molly, can I have a word in my office? Five minutes, alright?" Mike Stamford poked his head around the door.

"Yeah, sure. Just let me get cleaned up here." Molly plopped the brain she was holding into a metal bowl. "My Jane Doe's not going anywhere."

Mike smiled and disappeared.

_Great_. When Mike put on that forced _'everything's alright'_ smile, she knew something was up. Probably the new head of department, snooping through the paperwork, had found some discrepancies and attributed them to… You know who. She'd better go and sort this out.

She knocked on Mike's office door.

"Come in."

"You wanted a word." Molly was greeted with the sight of Mike sitting uncomfortably at his desk. Doctor Lawrence Barnett, the new head of the pathology department, was rifling through the filing cabinet.

"I'm sorry, Mol-" Mike barely uttered, when Barnett spoke over him.

"I'll get straight to the point, Doctor Hooper; I run a tight ship." The man's thin lips pressed together, suppressing his irritation for the sake of professionalism.

Molly held her tongue. The guy hadn't made any friends in the department yet. She had a feeling this conversation wasn't going to finish well.

"I want you to know that I fully intend to tighten up the sloppy practices that have been going on around here, for some time I can gather. Maybe even years. That includes you bringing unauthorised persons into this workplace. I won't stand for any more visits from your boyfriends, including this so called consulting detective of yours. I will not tolerate-"

"He's not my boyfriend," she blurted out. She shot an accusing look at Mike. He must have dropped her in it to save his own skin, but it was Mike that first let Sherlock in all those years ago, when he was posing as Lestrade in order to investigate a suspicious death. He had an ID badge and everything, Mike had pointed out at the time.

"What?"

"He's not my boyfriend." Molly held his attention, refusing to be intimidated by this man who hadn't made any attempt to integrate or ingratiate himself with the workforce.

"Even so, he's not welcome in this department, or even this hospital. I don't care if he's famous. I don't care if he helps the police. Do I make myself clear?"

"Abundantly clear."

Her phone beeped.

"Is it customary around here to perform postmortems with your phone in your pocket, Doctor Hooper?"

"You're absolutely right. And no more boyfriends. Got it."

"You can consider this a verbal warning. I really don't want to end up taking disciplinary action."

"If that's all, I have a postmortem to finish."

"Very well." Barnett dismissed her.

When she was safely back in the hallway, _phew_, she glanced at her phone.

I NEED YOU. SH.

_Good God, no need to shout._

* * *

Mary dumped the crusts back on her plate and picked up the Daily Mail.

"That's such a waste," commented her husband, reaching for them.

"I've never been big on crusts."

"But crumpets are all crust," he protested. "You just nibble it into a crust shape, look."

The TV blared out the latest headlines, _"... a matter of life and death. Are A and E departments overstretched? Figures suggest that admissions have gone up thirty one percent in the last two years. In other news, the import-export industry was rocked today by the resignation of Netherlands Sumatra company CEO Robert Jarvis, over an apparent row over a hostile takeover bid. If the takeover goes ahead, shareholders st-"_

John reached over the kitchen counter and turned it off. "Business as usual in the big smoke."

"Go on." Mary tossed he head toward the front door.

"What?" John feigned innocence.

"You're bored. Go and see Sherlock."

"Was I doing a look?" John frowned.

"You were doing _the_ look."

"But what about you? We were going to go for a walk."

"We've been taking walks for three weeks now, and every moment of them, you've been distracted. Look, I've come to terms with the fact that you were married to him long before you met me. I can tell when you're itching to get out there and do something reckless. You're just as addicted as him."

"I was not married to Sherlock."

Mary noticed that his only protest was about his relationship with the man, not about his being addicted to danger. "You know his pin number, for heaven's sake."

"I suppose that's not really healthy."

"Go. I'll just hang around here and-"

"Thanks. You're perfect," he hooked his coat rather too quickly.

"- eat."

* * *

"Do you know your phone is stuck on capitals?" she called as she negotiated the stairs of 221b.

"Molly. Good. I need a favour. A very special favour."

When she got to the kitchen he was tinkering with some test tubes of murky beige liquid. "I'm not stealing any more pancreatic fluids."

"What?" Sherlock flicked a test tube, "No, it's not that, it's… It's actually a bit embarrassing." He finally looked up from the experiment.

"What's wrong?" She removed her jacket and hung it absently on one of the dining chairs.

"I need someone with experience. Someone like you would be perfect. Close, but not too close."

"What about John?" She looked at him with deep concern in her eyes.

"No, no, no. John won't do. Molly, it has to be you." His hands went to his collar and began to fiddle with the button. "It's something that's been bothering me for quite some time."

_Oh, my God. Is he undressing? _Molly took a step back, confused. Sherlock was coming towards her slowly, fixing her with an utterly serious, almost hungry stare, unbuttoning his shirt the whole time. She never knew quite what to expect on these visits, when she was summoned to Baker Street. One day it was suturing a knife wound, lest hospital attention jeopardised the case; the next is was _'would you like to solve crimes?',_ and not, unfortunately, dinner. But his unpredictability was the lamp to her moth-like tendancies; how could she not find out what it was this time?

"When I get an idea in my head to do something, I'm afraid I just can't let it go." He flung the shirt aside.

_Really scaring me now_. His bare chest strained before her, but she daren't look. She looked at his face instead; a picture of pure grit and determination.

"I have to know… what it's like." He reached for her.

She squeezed her eyes shut._ Oh, God_…

He handed her his phone.

_Huh? _She looked down at the phone and then back up at the shirtless man in front of her. "What... what did you want me to do?"

"Take a picture of my back."

"Ohhhhhhhhh… that makes a _lot_ more sense."

"Why, what did you think I wanted you to do?" and then he answered his own question, "you thought I wanted – wanted us to…"

"Oh, God, _NO_-" she breathed. _Was that disappointment?_

"Molly-"

"Not that it would be a bad thing, I mean-"

"Molly-"

"It's not that I've totally ruled it out-"

"Molly-"

"I just didn't mean to imply-"

"Molly-"

"I didn't mean to say 'no' quite so emphatically-"

"You need to take control of your mouth."

"All I meant to say, is if you _were_ actually asking-"

"We are not talking about this now-"

"I would be the ideal person to, you know… if you'd never… done it."

"Okay, apparently we _are_ talking about this, though I'll never know how we got to this point in the first place, seeing as it's diametrically opposed to my original intention." There was a touch of amusement curling his lip. "What makes you think I'd never 'done it', as you so eloquently put?"

"Because you're always going on about women not being your thing-"

And then he sighed with the look of a long-suffering head-teacher, correcting the misconceptions of a young charge. "Molly Hooper, is it not absolutely inconceivable that an attractive, educated man of independent means, would not have intimate carnal knowledge of a woman?"

_That doesn't tell me anything, that just asks another question. _"But you-"

"Drop it. I mean it."

For a minute there she thought she'd been hallucinating. This was totally out of character for him... No, not _totally_ out of character. He did enjoy teasing people, provoking a reaction. This was not fair. He'd caught her unawares and then she'd made the mistake of opening her mouth... _Wait a minute, did I just throw myself at him? Crap. He thinks I'm throwing myself at him. _A headache began to form behind her eyes.

_Right, how to recover from this? Feign indifference. Deflect attention._ "The photo then."

"The _photos_. Plural." He took up position on a kitchen stool, just perched there like some mythical creature, and hung his head.

Then she saw what all the fuss was about. She tried not to gasp at the pattern of sores and welts that striated the pale waxy skin stretched over his ribs. A light, almost-imperceptible-unless-you-looked-this-closely, smattering of freckles over his shoulders were eclipsed by the angry, half healed cuts. Some were only grazes - if there was such a thing as 'only a graze' when you were being dragged backward over glass and rocks. Some were shallow, some were deeper, but some were almost to the bone.

_Oh, my poor darling._

She reached out and stroked his back, but he didn't seem to mind. This was a medical examination by a professional, after all. And then it occured to her that she'd never be more than a commodity to him. He'd never look at her the way she wanted him to. They'd always be at cross purposes like in the first part of their conversation. And what hurt the most was that he had no idea what a thing like this did to her.

She took in the contours of his almost hairless chest, the _pectoralis major_ and the well-defined abdominals, and below that, the beginnings of the dark, silky hair that promised more below his belt. The muscles of his arms, _deltoid, biceps, brachioradialis_, lean yet toned, the source of his almost preternatural strength, were tense and ready for action as always.

"Moriarty's associates did this to you?" she began to take the pictures, getting every angle like she did with the murder victims, compiling a forensic portfolio for him. She'd already faked his death; it crossed her mind that she might be doing it for real one day, with his body cold and rigid on a trolley.

"What makes you think that?"

"They're more than six months old, so it must have happened while you were away." She snapped away. There was only silence from Sherlock's side, so she added, "they tortured you, didn't they?"

"I didn't want John to know."

"I understand." More pictures. More light touches.

"But I have to know what it looks like. I have to know what_ I_ look like now." He turned his head like an owl. A very elegant, humanoid owl.

Yes, she could understand that. It wasn't just Sherlock being typically narcissistic; a disfigurement like this could really affect someone's sense of identity. And as Sherlock, he had to analyse it, get his head round it. Was it wrong that she thought it was rather sweet, that he hadn't been ready to look until now? All of a sudden he looked so fragile, so broken, and not just his body either. He looked almost normal, like any other person, looking at her like that. _If Sherlock can be hurt, what hope is there for the rest of us_?

"You couldn't just look in a mirror?" she said, to break the tension.

"That would only give me a mirror image."

"You could set up a system of mirrors so the image is turned around," she offered, glancing at the mirror on the mantle.

"Why would I go to all that effort, when I can just call you?" He actually looked a bit miffed at the suggestion.

"Anyway, here you go." She handed him back the phone.

"Thank you."

There was an uncomfortable silence while he perused the images, dark locks hanging down over his forehead. She couldn't tell if he was reacting favourably. If he didn't like what he saw, he would never have shown it._  
_

"So how are things going with Tom?"

"Yeah, things are going great," she said absently, twiddling her hair. _No they're not._

"No, they're not."

"If you're trying to-"

"I'm just trying to be a good friend."

"And that's what friends do, is it? You're branching out into social convention now."

"You had a fight, didn't you?"

"How could you possibly know that? Or shouldn't I ask?"

"Your eyes are red." Sherlock didn't even look up from his phone. "Not red enough that you've been crying recently, but red enough. It was last night, perhaps. You keep fiddling with your ring, like you're not sure it should be there. Also you're spending your lunch break taking naked photos of me. Not to mention the unequivocal sex invite."

"Unbelie-"

"Maybe it's for the best." He finally looked up, "He was extraordinarily dull. I mean, who goes around telling people their name is 'Tom'? That's not even a real name. State educated, holidays in Benidorm, watches Jeremy Kyle, eats 'Super-noodles' – whatever that is. Kind of person who walks into Sainsbury's and buys seventeen packets of cheese. Completely devoid of character. A real mummy's boy. And not very intelligent either. Meat dagger? Come on, _really?"_

The uncomfortable atmosphere gave way to her fully formed fury; how dare he invite her here to help and then proceed to tear down her relationship. _Well, two can play at this game._

"You tell people you're a sociopath, but I don't think it's pathological at _all_." She was shaking now, unused to speaking her mind or even standing up for herself. She'd said it; she'd actually said what she really thought of him. It was exhilarating, liberating. He used to be so untouchable, on his ivory pedestal, and she'd worshiped him. _Sherlock calls and I come running_. But not anymore. "I think you choose to be like that. You made your mind up a long time ago, never to let anyone in. What happened to you, to make you push away everyone who ever loved you?"

"I don't 'push away everyone who ever loved me'."

"What about your brother? What about Irene? That was real, wasn't it? You had your chance, why would you throw it away?"

"You don't know what you're getting into, Molly." He wasn't just incredulous now, his voice deepened and his face was clouded with a real anger that frightened her to her core. "I think you'd better go."

"Something traumatic happened to you. People don't just... wake up one day and decide to fight crime."

"STOP IT. STOP IT, NOW."

Molly's lower lip trembled. A tear stabbed at the corner of her eye.

"Actually," he growled, pointing to the door, "I think you'd better go."

She fled, passing John on the way out, not stopping to greet him.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"Ask your best friend," she sniffed, not looking back.

On the way to the tube, she paused. _Damn, forgot to tell him about the Jane Does. _And in her fluster, she'd forgotten to tell him about Barnett's new rules.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

"What did you do to Molly?" John dumped his carrier bag of Quavers and Mint Aeros on the kitchen table, brushing aside beakers of foul smelling liquid.

"Why don't you ask what she did to me?" Sherlock was buttoning up his shirt. This precipitated a raised eyebrow from John.

He was too tired to resist playing the game. "Okay, what did she do to you?"

"She wanted to have sex. I declined."

"Naturally. I can see why you'd be upset."

"I'm not upset." And there it was; the disproportionately intense scowl and the defensiveness of a stroppy child, that John had come to know meant, the man's feathers were ruffled. _Sex doesn't alarm me_, he'd said. Still, John knew it couldn't have been that straight forward. Maybe Sherlock had gotten the wrong end of the stick. Stranger things had happened.

"She left her coat," John smoothed it down on the back of the chair. Brown corduroy.

"What brings you here on your day off?" Sherlock continued, "shouldn't you be rubbing your wife's feet, or something?"

"I'm rubbing her up the wrong way at the moment."

"Hormones."

"So she sent me out to do something constructive." He picked up one of the test tubes full of brown gunk. "What's this? Smells like the devil's crotch."

"I'm recording the rate of enzyme decay on various stomach contents after death." Sherlock slipped his eye-wear back on, preparing for splatter. A beaker bubbled ominously. "Hopefully it will shed some light on the Villegas case."

"Still chipping away at that one?"

"There's nothing else to do around here. Besides sleep with Molly, apparently." Sherlock resumed his experiment as John lazily picked up the newspaper. He was stopped by Sherlock's phone ringing and dancing around on the table.

"Get that, will you."

John sighed and resigned himself to the position of personal secretary for the day. "Sherlock Holmes' phone. John speaking, how can I help you?" he said in his best receptionist's voice.

"_You can stop playing silly beggars and come down to Earl's Court,"_ came Lestrade's gruff voice, _"I've got another locked-room case for you."_

"Thanks, yeah, okay, no, no problem," John continued with the act, "I'll tell him. Thank's, yeah, okay, love you, bye-bye."

"That was Lestrade," said Sherlock.

John put the phone down, defeated. "_How_ do you do it?" But Sherlock had already leaped into action and was putting on his scarf.

A bang on the front door startled them both. Three solid knocks, without the unconscious Morse code patterns of a casual caller, always meant bad news or something urgent. Although, it was not completely unheard of for a caller to arrive the moment they planned to leave the flat.

_You're here, I'm here, Lestrade is at the crime scene,_ John's look seemed to say, _Molly's never speaking to you again, so who could that be?_

Before they could get there, Mrs Hudson had answered the door and was standing in front of a worried young woman. The cold October blasted through the open doorway. Sherlock stopped dead at the top of the last seven steps. Time slowed down. The girl had long, greasy, dark hair and exotic eyes filled with fear. She was dressed in a red body-warmer and held a wrapped bouquet out in front of her. She seemed to retreat, trembling, as Sherlock stepped down. She dropped the bouquet on the floor and said a single word, _"Vă rog!",_ then she was gone.

Sherlock pushed past the confused Mrs Hudson and tried to chase the girl down the road, but she was already out of sight. He put his hands on his knees halfway down Baker Street, puffing. He'd gotten out of practice since he'd gotten back from Serbia, didn't have the energy he once had.

Back inside, John was chatting with Mrs Hudson. "Takes all sorts," she said, "still, we're getting used to young women running out on you, aren't we sweetheart?" She handed him the brown paper wrapped bouquet.

"_Papaver Somnifarum." _Sherlock breathed, blanching. The red poppies bobbed up and down as he turned the bunch, looking for a note or a card.

"Are you alright?"

Sherlock took his time answering, eyes flickering through his memory. "Fine, just felt like I'd seen a ghost, that's all." He reverently laid the flowers back onto Mrs Hudson's arms, back to his usual self within a split second. "Be a dear and put those in some water. Come on John, a homicide requires our urgent attendance."

And with that they were gone, leaving Mrs Hudson with her questions. However, she shrugged them off and turned to go inside and get a vase.

* * *

Movie posters flicked by as the tube carriage rocked them all the way to Earl's Court. Sherlock ignored all of John's questions. _Who was she? What language was that? What does it mean when someone gives you poppies? Isn't that the secret language of flowers? You upset a girl, didn't you. First Molly, and now this._

"You need to let me in," said John, "don't shut me out of this, Sherlock._"_

"Hmmm?"

"I said let me in."

He seemed to consider that for a moment, brightening up, fishing in his coat pocket for something. "All in good time." He produced a white paper envelope, reaching over to John's side of the carriage.

"What's this?" John ripped it open ceremoniously, a lopsided smile tugging at his face.

"A gift."

"Sherlock, this is a lot of money."

"It's the proceeds from the King of Sweden case. I took the liberty of opening a trust fund for little Sherlock."

John remained motionless for a second, poker-faced. _Ugh, how was he going to explain this? _"The _fuck_ you did."

Sherlock cocked his head a little, perplexed. A few other passengers turned in their direction. Most didn't want to get involved.

"I thought you'd be happy."

"LITTLE SHERLOCK?" John was standing now, waving his arms around.

"There's no need to shout, John, you're only two meters away-"

"WE'RE NOT CALLING HIM SHERLOCK. OR MYCROFT, OR ANY OTHER NASOPHARYNGEAL SPASM YOUR PARENTS MISTOOK FOR A NAME-"

"Actually, I think they just stuck a pin in the phone-book." Sherlock looked at the grimy floor waiting for John to calm down.

John rubbed his face. "It's not your job to provide for him. That's my job. I'm his father. And it's not even a 'him' yet. She's only four months pregnant!"

"There's evidence-"

John cut him off, "I will decide how and when this child gets a trust fund, Sherlock, if at all," and then he added muttering, "I want my son to work for a living."

"You think I don't work for a living?"

"That's not what I meant."

"No, that is what you meant. Because I grew up in a big house, went to private school, then Cambridge, you think I've never had to work hard. That's it isn't it? Well I can tell a working class shoulder chip when I smell one."

"I don't have a chip on my shoulder, and don't turn this around."

"You think this," Sherlock gestured around, "all this isn't hard work for me. That all the case work doesn't break a sweat?"

"No, I think it's _effortless_ for you, because you're so damn high functioning."

They stared at each other across the carriage, sulking for a while. Bayswater came and went.

Finally Sherlock spoke. "I had a job once, you know."

"Oh yeah?" John was still feeling confrontational.

"Yeah. It was the raw materials laboratory in a toothpaste factory. Lasted about an hour before they found me chain smoking in the toilets out of sheer boredom."

John was trying his damn hardest not to share the joke. Then his mouth began to twitch and his anger turned to full blown mirth, and before long they were both lolling around on the seats, giggling like schoolboys.

Sherlock wiped a tear from his eye just as they pulled into Kensington High Street. "It _is_ a boy, though, isn't it?"

"Sherlock…" John warned as they pulled off again.

"I was just trying to be nice."

"It's appreciated, but it's not appreciated."

"Either way…" Sherlock secreted the envelope back in his coat pocket.

* * *

Later in his blog, John would say that Sherlock broke his own personal record that day. 30 seconds to solve a murder. They'd descended into the basement flat of an old townhouse just off the Earl's Court Gardens. One of those properties crammed to the rafters with struggling young professionals, somehow all managing to make a life for themselves without the luxury of space.

Lestrade and Sally Donovan were crammed into the tiny bedsit, interviewing the dead girl's housemate. John observed Sherlock hanging in the doorway and studiously ignoring her, while Donovan reciprocated, her lack of interest hiding the guilt of all the treasonable things she'd said about him.

"I heard her fighting with her boyfriend before I went to bed," the housemate was saying, tugging at a preppy cardigan, stroking her own pig tails for comfort. "When I called on her this morning, the door was locked. She normally leaves for work around nine, but her mail was still on the mat at around eleven. We burst in and she was slumped against the door."

"Any signs of forced entry?" Lestrade asked.

_No,_ Donovan shook her head. "There aren't even any windows on this side of the basement. But we're bringing the boyfriend in for questioning, obviously"

"Oh, Hi, Sherlock," said Lestrade, "hi, John."

"There isn't even room to swing a cat in here, let alone murder someone." John knelt down to examine the corpse. Jennifer Birt. She was on her side on the carpet, still lying where the door had pushed her. There was a contusion on the back of her head, glistening between long corn-row braids, probably from a glass object. It wasn't enough to have killed her, anyway.

It was then that Sherlock did something so elegantly disrespectful, so arrogant, that John couldn't help but stare in awe. He ignored the housemate, stepped over the body, threw open the cupboard to reveal hundreds of cans of tuna, announced that it was mercury poisoning and tossed one of the cans to Donovan, who just stood there with her mouth open. No, not just open, about to utter the immortal word 'freak'. At the same time Lestrade opened his mouth to say 'how'. Then Sherlock turned on his heels, stepped back over the corpse, which they now knew was only the victim of her own bad eating habits, and reached into a homemade calico shopping bag that was hanging on the back of the door. He pulled out a picture frame, about five by five inches, containing a cross-stitch sampler saying _'He who cares wins'_. The glass in the frame was shattered. He handed it carefully to Donovan, who was already wearing latex gloves.

"What… Just happened?" she asked, mouth lax.

"Care to expound?" Lestrade put his hands on his hips, "so, you know, I can fill out the paperwork with actual facts."

Sherlock pointed to various items around the girls room. He didn't like wasting time. "Dry skin cream, falling hair, loose teeth, erratic behaviour, empty hook on the door. She had a seizure and fell back on the picture. The picture fell in the bag. The boyfriend is innocent. How long, John?"

"Huh?"

"I said, how long?"

John glanced at his watch, "About twenty nine seconds from the moment we came in the door."

"That was fun," said Sherlock, "what's next?"

And then they were gone.

* * *

Lestrade's phone beeped with a text message. Donovan's phone beeped straight after it. Every police officer in the house started talking into their radios at the same time.

Lestrade looked up from his phone. "Looks like we got another one."

"Two in one day?" Sally said , dryly, "we are on a roll."

* * *

John and Sherlock were back out on the street and the dead girl's housemate was following them, stumbling over her own feet, saying, "you're him, aren't you? You're the guy in the papers." She caught up with John. "That was incredible. How did he know all that stuff?"

They were leaving the Gardens now and turning back onto Earl's Court Road. Sherlock began to look for a cab, leaving the other two behind in conversation.

"He knows everything," said John, "watch this; SHERLOCK, WHAT TIME IS IT IN ADDIS ABABA?"

Sherlock didn't even look at his watch. "Three twenty-six pm."

"How would you know if that's right?" The girl wasn't impressed.

"SHERLOCK, WHAT'S NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY SIX TIMES FIFTY THREE?"

"Fifty two thousand seven hundred and eighty eight." Sherlock did not skip a beat, although he was not having a lot of success with the cab.

"Is that right?" asked the girl.

John just shrugged, he didn't care, he was enjoying himself now. "SHERLOCK, What's number one in the charts right now?"

"No Idea." Sherlock finally flagged one down as they caught up with him.

"Well," John said to the girl, "maybe not everything."

"John, if you've quite finished showing me off. I don't believe we've had the pleasure of your name,"

"Oh," the girl blushed, holding out her hand, which Sherlock took briefly, "Amelia. Amelia Hubbard."

"I hope you're happy together." Sherlock opened the cab door.

"Wait!" Lestrade caught up, puffing. He leaned on the cab.

"'Ere, are you people actually going somewhere," called the cabbie, "or are you all just going to stand around talking, because you don't need me for that."

"Yes, we are. Sorry." John reassured him by getting in.

"Glen," said Sherlock, "Please tell me you've got a real homicide this time, not another one of these absurdities."

"We don't know yet. But won't it kill you if you never find out?" Lestrade smiled sardonically.

"I suppose we could take a look." Sherlock was trying not to give him the satisfaction of knowing he'd got him interested in something, but John knew deep down he was excited by this new development. "Where do you want us to meet you?"

"Down by the Leg 'o Mutton."

"I know it. Lonsdale Road."

* * *

**Okay, this may seem like a string of completely unconnected incidents, but bear with me here. Every thing that happens means something. It will all come together! **


	4. Chapter 4

**Wow everyone! I've just been so encouraged by all the positive feedback for this! If anyone has constructive criticism, I am totally open to that... I'm a big girl, I can handle it. This is my first attempt at writing mystery/thriller so it's being quite difficult to plot... I usually only do romance. But then romance always has an element of mystery to it. Will they or won't they?**

* * *

**Chapter Four**

"Mike, where's my body?" Molly barged into his office while he was on the phone.

"Below your head, hopefully," Mike put down the receiver.

"I thought maybe you'd hijacked it for your anatomy students."

"I don't have any anatomy students today. Are you sure you didn't file her under z?"

"She's not in the morgue and she's not in the freezer. If someone's pranking me, it's not funny."

"Maybe Barnett requisitioned her for his enquiry."

"Enquiry?"

"You did know that's why he was here."

"Oh, my God," Molly whacked his desk with the paperwork in her hand. Mike jumped ever so slightly. "I'm going to lose my job."

"Molly," Mike got up from his chair, "Molly, wait!" But she was gone.

Hurrying down the corridor, trying to find Barnett, irrational thoughts were swirling around her head. _He's going to find all kinds of inconsistencies in my work and it's all because of… all because of… you know who._

Under normal circumstances, all the attention from Barnett would be justified. But in her case, promises had been made. Promises which should have protected her from the consequences and she'd been naive enough to believe them.

She'd helpfully made body parts go 'missing' on a regular basis. She'd signed a death certificate for a certain person who, it turned out, was still alive. She'd allowed a man to be cremated in his place, without even waiting for the body to be claimed. Not to mention a certain person's brother had 'acquired' a number of cadavers for Operation Bond Air and asked her to leave certain details out of the paperwork… for the sake of national security and all that. Not that she'd done it out of a misplaced sense of patriotism.

There were harsh penalties for unethical treatment of the dead. She could get struck off for this. Or worse, go to prison.

Her mind began to race with different scenarios. How would she survive without this job? She'd spent her entire life studying medicine. It wasn't like she had waitressing experience. And what about prison? She'd be Big Bertha's bitch within seconds of arriving.

And all for flipping Sherlock bloody Holmes. _He thinks he's so clever_, but she's the one solving the cases that really matter. The murders that Sherlock thinks aren't interesting enough; like someone's domestic abuse giving their wife an aneurysm. Work that gave families justice; work she did every single day. She was the detective here, not him.

Her phone beeped with a text message.

I WANT TO APOLOGISE FOR EARLIER…

* * *

"All I'm saying is, one more arrest and your man here is looking at doing some actual time," Lestrade uncomfortably shoved his size tens into the wellington boots, preparing to go down to the water's edge.

"Really, Gene, there's no need to be so melodramatic. They were all minor offences," said Sherlock as they made their way down the muddy bank to the lagoon, part of a nature reserve on the banks of the Thames.

"Minor? You were arrested thirteen times in one year, as I recall," Lestrade hushed his voice a little for the next part, "affray, inciting a riot outside a courtroom, hacking into the national library's computer system, possession of a lock knife in a public place without a reasonable excuse-"

"How come you know his rap sheet off by heart?" John looked at Lestrade with something like admiration for his tolerance levels.

"- breaking and entering, possession of an illegal firearm, possession of class A drugs… need I go on?"

"That was a long time ago," said the accused.

"It wasn't _that_ long ago. And for some reason, the charges have been dropped every single time."

"It wasn't in the public's interest to pursue a prosecution." Sherlock waved his comments off as the approached the body. John listened to all of this with mild amusement.

"You mean it wasn't in Mycroft Holmes' interest to pursue a prosecution. But he won't be able to protect you forever." Lestrade stopped at the white tarpaulin and lifted it up. "A dog walker spotted her from the other side. SOCOs tell me she's been dumped here within the last couple of hours."

John had seen a lot of death and destruction in his time but he couldn't claim to ever be comfortable with violence against women. He flinched slightly at the state of the naked woman laying prone on the mud.

"What have they got so far?" Sherlock knelt down to take a look at the huge letterbox shaped wound on her leg. He prodded it with a pencil.

"Late twenties, eastern European origin, no ID," Lestrade read from the technician's notes, "surgical incision in the left leg-"

"Sorry," said John, "is everyone ignoring the most obvious thing here?"

The other two looked up at him, quizzically.

"Her brain…? She's got no… brain."

"Obviously," Sherlock wondered why this was a problem.

"Any theories?" asked Lestrade.

"Serial killer?" John crouched down to examine her himself. The top of her head had been sawn off and there was no brain tissue to speak of. She looked uncannily like his breakfast boiled egg.

"How sweet. You're trying to make my day." Sherlock snapped a picture of her with his phone, frowning. "You know, I think I've seen this woman before. Who do we know who does work like this?"

"There's evidence of refrigeration," John continued his analysis, "the incision was made before death. The brain was removed after death, almost like in a post mortem…" his mouth rested on the 'm'.

"At last, he's caught up. That medical degree hasn't gone to waste after all. Call the morgue." Sherlock's whole countenance changed and he turned on his heels and headed back up the bank. "On second thoughts, don't call ahead. I think it'd be better if we dropped in unannounced. Wouldn't want to spook anybody."

* * *

Molly read the message again, as she loitered under the Hogarth on the stairs.

I WANT TO APOLOGISE FOR EARLIER. WILL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING. COFFEE?

* * *

"Wait, let's not jump to conclusions," John tried to keep up with Sherlock as Lestrade phoned his superiors at the yard.

"My brain is an organic quantum computer, John, capable of calculating the near infinite number of possibilities and narrowing it down to the most likely explanation. It is not subject to, nor does it ever come close to suffering from, inference-observation confusion, but if, for argument's sake, I were jumping to conclusions they would be the _correct_ conclusions," Sherlock spoke quickly, texting at the same time. "Surgical incision, a cavity in the thigh muscle, a woman of eastern European origin with no ID; it can only mean one thing"

"Smuggling?" John wasn't sure if he was asking a question of making a statement.

"That's what I thought too," Lestrade was just getting off the phone as they reached the cars parked under the plane trees by the riverside.

"Well don't," said Sherlock, still texting and pacing.

"Have I missed something here?" asked John.

"There's been a crackdown on smuggling in the last two months, you know that, Gerry. No-one would dare mount a smuggling operation at the moment with every major port in England crawling with armed police and customs officers. No, there's something else going on here."

"She was abducted by aliens?"

"Come on John," Sherlock stopped pacing beside Lestrade's car, "she was abducted by someone. Not aliens but someone. She got into this against her will. Who in their right mind would allow someone to cut into them and sew something that big into their flesh?"

"They would do it if the money was good enough," said John.

"She's Romanian. Not _just_ Romanian, she was recruited from a _specific_ village in Romania." Sherlock showed them the picture on his phone. "High, Dacian cheekbones, roman nose, wide pelvis and a few other idiosyncrasies, according to my anthropologist."

"You have an anthropologist now?" Lestrade squinted at him.

"So you're thinking she got in with traffickers." John felt a bad taste rising up at his own words. "And then they used her to hide drugs."

Sherlock's face clouded with concentration. "It would explain how they would get past the blockades, but why go to all this trouble over such a measly amount of... merchandise?"

Lestrade's left eyebrow arched at the mention of merchandise.

"No, someone stole this body from the morgue and tried to dump it in the river. It was for a very good reason. The best reason. Someone was trying to cover their tracks. Lucky for us they were in a hurry and they panicked, otherwise they would have done a lot better job of it."

"It had to have been something a lot more valuable than drugs." Lestrade started to unlock his car.

Sherlock turned to him thoughtfully with a raised finger. "You must have been contacted about a possible violent death when the coroner called an investigation."

"What are you insinuating?"

"Well, you know, an illegal immigrant. Rootless, nameless. Now, I'll warrant you, brainless-"

"You didn't think it was suspicious either."

"I was working on another case. But at least I remembered her face." And then he muttered under his breath, "and they think I'm inhuman."

* * *

"You're not really supposed to be in here, you know." Mike opened the freezer drawer. "I could get in trouble."

"Oh, come on, Mike," said John, "what's a little bit of fraud between friends."

"I don't mind sending you things over the phone, but I've got this new department head breathing down my neck now."

"I think it's safe to assume our Jane Doe on the river bank is your missing body." Sherlock bumped it closed.

"She was on Molly's list. She was a bit out of sorts today, seemed to be taking this one personally. I mean, she doesn't normally take on these cases as a personal crusade, but this one-"

"This was Molly's case? Of course. Where is Molly now?" asked Sherlock.

"Come to think of it," a frown lined Mike's chubby face, "I haven't seen her for a couple of hours."

"Well, phone her then," said Sherlock impatiently.

"Can't you phone her?" asked Mike, patting down his pockets.

"He upset her at lunchtime," added John, helpfully, while dialing Molly's number.

"_She_ upset me," insisted Sherlock.

John teased him with sucked in cheeks. _You slipped up then; you said you weren't upset.  
_

"She had a bit of a row with Barnett too," said Mike, thoughtfully.

"Barnett, who's Barnett?" asked John, his phone to his ear, waiting for someone to answer.

"The new head of department. He wasn't happy with Molly's work," then he looked at Sherlock, "he wasn't happy with us letting you in here."

"You had to let me in here, I'm a police consultant."

"Well, not exactly." Lestrade scratched his nose, self-consciously.

"She's not answering." John looked worried.

"Where's Barnett's office?" Sherlock took Mike roughly by his tweed collar.

Mike was blank, scared. "I haven't seen Barnett for hours either."

"Mike, this is important," said Sherlock, "Someone stole a body from this morgue. They were trying to cover something up and I think Molly got in the way. You need to tell me everything you can remember about this case. John, get Barnett's number and track him down. Be subtle. Gerry, we have to find Molly, her life may be in danger-"

"You do know," said Lestrade, "that this is my investigation, yeah?"


	5. Chapter 5

**Hi everyone! hope this is not turning too boring. I tend to set up a lot of dominoes before knocking them down!**

* * *

**Chapter Five**

HOW MUCH? MW

YEAH, I KNOW, CRAY ISN'T IT. JW

*CRAAY* OH FUCK OFF (NOT YOU MARY, STUPID BIG MAN THUMBS) *CRAZY*JW

YOU HAVE TO TAKE IT. MW

NO WAY. HE'S TRYING TO EMASCULATE ME. JW

IF SHERLOCK WANTED TO EMASCULATE YOU, I'M SURE HE'D FIND A BETTER WAY. BESIDES, HAVE YOU SEEN THE BANK STATEMENT LATELY? IF YOU WANT YOUR CHILD TO GO TO UNIVERSITY SWALLOW YOUR PRIDE AND ACCEPT THE BLOODY MONEY. MW

FIVE FIGURES, MARY. THERE ARE ALWAYS STRINGS ATTACHED TO FIGURES OF FIVE OR GREATER. JW

HE DOESN'T SEE MONEY THAT WAY. DON'T YOU KNOW THAT BY NOW? FAVOURS ARE HIS CURRENCY. MW

MARY, WOULD YOU MIND TELLING JOHN TO STOP STANDING IN THE CORNER, GET OFF HIS PHONE AND HELP WITH THE SEARCH? SH

CERTAINLY SHERLOCK, MAY I ASK WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR? MW

NOT WHAT, MARY, WHO. MOLLY HOOPER IS MISSING. SH

JOHN, GET OFF THE PHONE AND HELP SHERLOCK LOOK FOR MOLLY. MW

I'M SURE SHE'S FINE. JUST TAKING PRECAUTIONS. I PROBABLY WON'T BE HOME FOR DINNER THO. JW

WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS BEFORE TEXTING ME ABOUT THE MONEY? MW

MARY, ARE YOU AWARE THAT YOU JUST SENT THAT TO ME? SH

OOPS. DON'T LISTEN TO JOHN. HE'S AN IDIOT. MW

AGREED. SH

IS THERE ANYHTING I CAN DO TO HELP? MW

NOPE. SH

I HAVE TO GO, SHERLOCK IS MAKING A MOVE TOWARDS THE DOOR. LOVE YOU. JW

HOPE MOLLY IS OKAY. IT'S NOT LIKE HER. LET ME KNOW IF I CAN HELP. GETTING SICK OF PREGNANCY MAGAZINES. MW

* * *

All the usual police procedures had proved unfruitful so far. Lestrade had sent uniforms to her flat. Hospital security was passing round her photo. Security footage was either insufficient or inconclusive. Sherlock had already interrogated Mike until the poor man's head was spinning. They'd checked the diary in her office for appointments and followed up every viable lead. No-one had been in and out of the morgue except Molly, Caroline - the phlebotomist, and Mike himself. Furthermore, because he was new, no-one could tell them anything about Lawrence Barnett. Lestrade was already busy tracking down the head of human resources.

Sherlock burst through the back gates onto Giltspur Street with John hot on his heels. He saw the single storey ambulance station in front of him, the red phone box, the wooden benches. A renovation company's white van was parked in one of the spaces reserved for paramedics. "It's likely they initially took the body away in an ambulance. They come and go constantly. They had an ideal window between eleven and twelve o'clock."

What he didn't iterate, was of course, that they took it while Molly was at Baker Street, probably waiting for the moment she left for her lunch break, and that if he hadn't summoned her, the course of the day's events would have panned out a lot differently. He would not allow himself to entertain the possibility that, in any one of the myriad scenarios his brain had calculated, he was to blame. It was much better to focus on finding her.

"It's conceivable that they took Molly away by ambulance too." Sherlock wouldn't let himself entertain the notion of what an ambulance implied either.

They were out on the pavement now, turning around and around to get their bearings, or a clue. Any clue. _Anything…_

"It's also conceivable that they ran away together. Did you think of that?" John squinted against the low October sun. He watched Sherlock, stern with concentration, nose wrinkling in the crisp, cold, 'fresh' air, discerning everything from the saturated fat content of the builder's lunch to the illegally high carbon emissions of the passing Mercedes.

"I've narrowed it down to three possibilities. One, Barnett took Molly. Two, Molly took Barnett and she's in reality the mastermind of this whole operation. Three, a coincidence and you know I don't believe in coincidences, John. John… JOHN!"

John had come to a standstill while he was talking and was staring at him, swallowing thickly, with an unidentifiable expression.

_Yes, what was that expression?_ Sherlock's catalogue of facial cues was failing him. "What is it?"

John recovered enough to say, "Look where you are standing."

Sherlock looked down at his feet. "Oh." He was standing in the exact same place where he'd laid down and pretended to be dead three years ago. Somehow both of them expected there to some kind of mark there, anything that would testify as to what went down that fateful day, but it was nothing but workaday, hard, grey pavement. Thousands of feet had passed over the spot without a thought to how that concrete had changed so many people's lives. If there had ever been any memorial flowers left by Sherlock's followers they were long gone, and only traces of organic matter near the wall of Dominion House remained.

Sherlock stepped back slowly, almost reverently, a concession he told himself he was allowing John, but really it was too much like walking over his own grave.

They pushed back through the gates marked 'In Constant Use'.

Back in the courtyard, Sherlock cast around for signs of a struggle, torn clothing, even blood.

The thought of Molly being hurt made his own blood boil. Thinking back to their lunchtime conversation, he was willing to admit now that his little experiment had backfired. He hadn't counted on how determined she was to find out who he really was. There was only so much a person could find out without asking him directly. Hell, he'd left so little actual evidence in his wake; even _he'd_ be hard pressed to find out who he really was. His timing was awful; if he'd known then that she'd had a fight with Tom he would never have texted her. Maybe her defenses were already low. Maybe it had been a little too intimate. He'd dared to let her see a sliver of his vulnerability to see how she'd react, see how she'd cope with the truth when it was laid out in front of her, undeniable. He wasn't entirely sure of his hypothesis either; Molly always clouded things. What was the desired outcome of this test? That he'd scare her away? That she'd dumbly accept what he was asking her to do and then go back to their normal lives? One thing was certain though; he'd been wholly unprepared for her response. No good could come of these experimental little forays into the maze these mortals labelled 'emotion'.

He'd shouted at her. The memory made him wince even now.

S_tupid, stupid, stupid, Ordinary-Sherlock. That's what ordinary people do; shout at each other when they don't know how to process their emotions_. That couldn't be the last conversation they ever had. He couldn't… wouldn't let it be the last conversation they ever had. He shook the idea out of his head. He needed to stay focused if they were going to solve this; couldn't afford to get emotionally involved. He told himself she was just another client. A faceless Jane Doe in the mortuary.

"Molly's smart," John kicked the dust around under the maple tree, morose, "if she knew she was going to be taken, she'd leave a clue."

"Yes, she would," Sherlock licked his lips thoughtfully. Molly was definitely the type to solve her own murder. His mind flashed back to the image of her poring over his supposedly dead body, making notes, making it authentic. In his daydream they swapped places and she was the one on the slab and he was the one taking notes. He banished the image… _Not now!_ "Clever girl. Breadcrumbs," he said, taking out his phone.

What happened next surprised them both. For entirely different reasons. Sherlock was a little surprised that had worked; it _was_ a long shot. John was surprised that her choice of ring tone for Sherlock was 'Build Me Up Buttercup' by the Foundations. The irony was totally lost on Sherlock, he noted. Nevertheless, the phone was ringing and it was coming from the row of wheelie bins outside the mortuary fire exit.

The two men exchanged a look that simultaneously said _please-God-no_ and _I-didn't-know-finding-something-would-feel-like-this._

John flung open the lid of the first one and hoisted himself up for a better look before it stopped ringing. "Shit, I'm going to have to get in."

But Sherlock had already ducked underneath and was bringing up the still ringing handset. He had a quick flick through the messages as John straightened himself out again.

I WANT TO APOLOGISE FOR EARLIER. WILL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING. COFFEE? MEET ME UNDER THE POOL OF BETHESDA. BARNETT

"The pool of Bethesda?"

John was reading it upside down, pleased he knew something Sherlock didn't. "It's a painting in Bart's museum."

* * *

Far away across the city, in a suburb of Ruislip, uniformed police officers knocked on the door of Lawrence Barnett's recently rented mock-tudor semi. Not receiving an answer, PC Dale Lees of the Metropolitan Police Force peered through the letterbox and caught a glimpse of his first suicide.

* * *

**Duh-duh-daaaah! I love cliff hangers. Now, show the review box some love. Hell, why not throw caution to the wind and tick follow and favourite too... The more the readers review, the more the writers write, and _voila_, everyone's happy! **


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

She knew where she'd gone wrong. She should have scoured the flat for evidence of Sherlock a lot sooner after he'd left for his mission. The longer you left it, the less you noticed things and soon they became part of the landscape you ignored on a daily basis. If she'd cleansed her bedroom of all traces of Sherlock immediately after he'd left, Tom wouldn't have found the sweater in her bottom drawer. He wouldn't have looked up at her with those wide pale eyes.

_What are you doing, going through my drawers? _She'd yelled.

_Why have you kept a man's sweater?_ He'd yelled back.

But they both knew this wasn't about a sweater.

She tested the cable ties on her wrists again. They seemed to be getting tighter, not looser. She felt strangely calm. Must be the drugs in her system. The stench of other people's body fluids filled her nostrils and she squirmed to avoid a patch of damp on the disheveled bedclothes. One of those Indian print coverlets, frayed at the corners. There was no sheet and no pillow. The walls resembled those prefabricated huts they used in schools. Cheap, temporary, transportable. The only window, Perspex covered in a rusting wire mesh, looked out on yet another plasterboard wall. Dim light, a mixture of diffused winter sunset and fluorescent strip, told her she was in a building within a building. She was hungry, so she must have been here for at least four hours. She filed away every detail; that's what they told you to do, wasn't it?

_Rule number one of a hostage situation; remember as many details as you can_. The human memory was unreliable, susceptible to misinformation and she was no exception. Retrieval enhanced suggestibility, they called it.

She'd decided to work backwards and unpick the story that brought her here. Not that understanding it would change anything. She would still be strapped to a filthy iron bedstead in a dank hovel. She'd lost her trousers and shoes somewhere along the way. It was freezing and when she hitched her bare legs up as much as the cable ties would allow, she saw that her thighs were starting to turn blue and mottled from exposure. Mercifully, she still had the meager protection of her underwear.

Many rooms away, there was a scream followed by desperate, choked sobbing. She squeezed her eyes shut. There was nothing she could do to protect her ears from the horror of this hell hole so she went back to her analysis.

The cracks in their relationship had already started prior to that argument. He constantly lied about where he was and who he was with. It was all part of his job, he'd protested. She'd attacked him with vague accusations of what she thought the paparazzi were capable of, how tabloid hacks had hounded people like Sherlock until they were forced to take their own lives. He wasn't like those people, he'd said, he was a legitimate journalist, he was trying for awards, reporting on real stuff, like social justice, the state of the nation.

_And Sherlock wasn't dead after all, was he, and how often did he stay here, and when was the last time he stayed here, Molly?_ Tom's whiney hurt voice rang in her head. It was all a bit much really.

Her dreams of settling down, trying for kids before she hit thirty five and proving everyone wrong by starting that oft thought of, but ne'er started PhD, were gradually being replaced by staying up late on the sofa, drinking too much cheap rosé, and angry, unsatisfying, make-up sex. She wondered if being with Sherlock and all his instability might actually, after all, be preferable to the soul destroying, prosaic drama of her suburban decay. Was it Chekov who said, 'any idiot can face a crisis, it's the day to day life that wears you out'?

Tom probably didn't even know she was gone. He'd seemed pretty determined when he left, muttering about checking up on a source. He'd be gone for days.

How she longed for the scent of that sweater now. It was her go-to comforter, only coming out of the drawer in times of extreme stress, or when she missed it's owner more than she could bear. She'd hold the soft grey lamb's wool to her cheek and inhale deeply of the lingering sandalwood, and wonder where he was at that particular moment in time. Then she'd fold it carefully and place it back in the drawer. Tom thought she'd kept the sweater out of sentimentality; he didn't know about her little vice.

The sweater was the first mistake.

The next thing she'd done wrong was to drink Barnett's benzodiazepine laced coffee.

Oh, there he was now, crashing through the door. Followed by a man she hadn't seen before.

* * *

"That confirms it then," said Lestrade, taking notes. The CCTV footage from the Hospital Museum showed Molly bounding up the grand stair case and greeting Barnett. They bowed their heads in mute conversation for a few seconds and then turned and headed, presumably, toward the café.

Sherlock looked up from his intense study of the computer screen. "Is it too warm in here?"

"We've just found conclusive proof that Barnett… the fake Barnett was the last person to see Molly and all you can think about is the air con?" Lestrade's voice was gravelly, condescending.

"A heater over the door blasts you when you enter the hall," Sherlock theorised, "The first thing you do is remove anything uncomfortably warm, hat, scarf…" he held up his own black leather gloves.

"But fake Barnett still has his gloves on." John scrutinised the grainy footage, as the assistant curator, an unfashionably bearded young man, rewound it for them.

"It could be nothing… It doesn't mean…" Lestrade began.

"It could well mean he thinks Molly is contaminated with something from the corpse." Sherlock completed the thought for him. He took out Molly's phone, which he'd secreted in a sandwich bag and made a note of some of the numbers through the plastic.

That could only mean he was planning on keeping it. This annoyed Lestrade no end. He held out his hand, beckoning with his fingers. "That's evidence now. Come on."

Sherlock reluctantly handed it over and Lestrade deposited it in one of his own evidence bags.

"In any case," Sherlock pretended not to be put out, "it does somewhat increase the urgency of the situation."

"Lay on the hyperbole, why don't you," said John.

"I'll take a copy of that," Lestrade told the curator.

"I trust you've followed all the official abduction procedures," Sherlock turned to the Inspector, putting his coat and scarf back on, "her handbag, usual haunts, financial records… the _boyfriend_." He said the word _'boyfriend'_ with unveiled contempt.

"Just let us do our job, Sherlock. You two try to keep out of trouble."

"Us, get in trouble?" John tipped his head toward Sherlock.

"It's what you do best." Yet Lestrade knew he'd issued them with more of a challenge than a directive to stay out of his investigation.

Sherlock was already out the door, coat flapping behind him like a cape._"Alle_z_ vite!"_

"I hate it when he does that."

* * *

"Are you going to rape me?" Molly strained her neck when she tried to lift her head toward the kidnappers. _Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry… _She dropped back down onto the bed, defeated by the laws of physics and the excoriating restraints. "I'm not just a piece of meat that you can pass around. I have feelings. I'm a _person_."

_Rule number two of a hostage situation; It is psychologically harder for a person to kill, rape, or otherwise harm a captive if the captive remains "human" in the captor's eyes. _

"I assure you will not be sexually assaulted, Miss Hooper." The stranger circled the bed, slowly, observing her.

He had an accent she couldn't quite identify. Eastern European? Yugoslavian? His head was shaved and his face was clean shaven, revealing a deep cleft in his chin. What she first thought to be a dimple on his cheek, turned out to be a deep puckered scar when he turned. His cold grey eyes bored into her. Why was he looking at her like that? What was he looking for?

"For you; the privilege of much higher destiny."

The man she knew as Lawrence Barnett slouched in the corner and lit up a cigarette with a cheap disposable lighter. Little bits of white plaster brushed off the wall onto his coat. He was the antithesis of the authoritative professional she'd met earlier in the day; the dye had been washed out of his hair, revealing nicotine stained grey, his posture that of a lay-about, and he now sported a green wind-cheater and jeans instead of the suit and tie.

"And you," she said to him, "what's your part in all of this?"

The two men looked at each other, sharing a silent joke. "Oh, him," said the Yugoslavian, "he just actor, grifter. I suppose you call him intelligence officer."

"What did you think? Did you like the middle class inflection?" He slipped into his Barnett voice, "quite convincing, wasn't it? You know the NHS really needs to spend more on security. Key cards can open so many doors for a man like me."

she knew he meant the metaphysical kind of doors and not just the physical doors that kept the boyeyman out. "You killed that girl, didn't you?"

"What girl?" said the actor.

"The girl with the scar. You cut her up, did God knows what to her and then you killed her. I don't know how, but you killed her." She tried so hard not to let any fear creep into her voice, but it cracked a little at the end.

Finally the guy walked over to the bed and flicked ash over her semi naked body. He leaned down close enough to whisper, the reek of his cheese and onion sandwich and the cigarette thick on his breath. "By the time I was finished with her, she was _begging_ for death."

"You shouldn't go poking around in other people business, Miss Hooper," said the Yugoslavian, "poking around gets you killed."

"That's Doctor Hooper to you."

"Doctor or no Doctor, you cannot save self now."

_Rule number three; cooperate with your captor. Don't make threats or become violent. _

_Fuck it-_

Molly jolted as she tried to kick him, but the plastic ties were too strong. "You'll pay for this," she spat, "Sherlock Holmes is coming for you and he's going to make you suffer-"

"I hope so, Miss," said the Yugoslavian with a smile as they both retreated out the door, "I sincerely hope so."

Now that they had gone, Molly was left alone with only the rising fear for company. _A higher destiny,_ he'd said. What was she, bait? And then a further, more sickening idea swept over her. She resisted the overwhelming urge to diagnose herself. _I'm an experiment. That's why they won't… touch me. They've poisoned me or given me a virus and they're waiting for me to die._

* * *

"Just let me kill her and get it over and done with." Wade dragged his nicotine yellow fingers through his greying shock of hair. "It's so much more elegant that way. No loose ends to tie up afterwards."

"No," said Jokic, "Alive she gives much better motivation for Mr Holmes."

"Whatever you say, boss."

"Borjan, you fuck up disposal today."

Two of Jokic's bodyguards dragged in the bloody and bruised Borjan.

"Where you find him?" Jokic asked the heavier of the two bodyguards.

"Cowering under the railway bridge in Richmond."

Wade went over to the locker and took out a sheet of polythene and a shotgun.

"You think you hide from me?" Jokic circled the cowering minion. "ME?"

Wade stubbed out his cigarette on the office wall and smiled a sick smile. "May I?"

"With this one, be my guest."

Wade spread out the plastic sheeting. Borjan's swollen face began to look very frightened. "I did it… for my sister." He burst into tears. "Please, please, she deserved a proper burial."

"Patient zero was your sister?" said Wade, "shit."

"You find him," Jokic slapped Wade upside the back of his head. "You no check?"

"It's inevitable one of them's going to try and play hero."

Jokic turned away from him and circled the cowering young man. "So you dump sister in river. Now cops interfere. I think you overestimate compassion of cops."

"You cannot murder a man for taking care of his sister." The bodyguards dragged Borjan over to the plastic sheet and dumped him on his backside. He keeled over, too weak to resist.

"In business you have no sister. Business more important than family. Here, Dario is sister," Jokic indicated the bodyguard to his left, "Rudolph is sister," he indicated the bodyguard on the right, who laughed. Jokic shook his head.

"Who's your daddy, Borjan?" Wade stalked over, still with that sick smile on his face.

"Only problem," said Jokic, examining his finger nails idly, "who cleans up when cleaner is dead?"

Borjan looked up at Wade with something like a prayer. "Please don't kill me-"

"I'm not going to kill you," said Wade, cooly, "the swine'll do that-" and then he blasted the man's kneecaps away with two precise shots of the twelve guage.

The bodyguards picked up the corners of the plastic sheet and ferried the unconscious red mass that was Borjan off to the pigpen.

"Borjan sister in morgue, now?" Jokic accepted a cigarette from Wade.

"Presumably." Wade lit them both up.

"Which one?"

"I'm not going back there. They'll apprehend on sight now we've taken the girl."

"Hmmm," Jokic thought, taking a drag. "The contamination cannot be detected by hospital or police. We leave Borjan sister for now. New girl more important. The other girls die too quickly, this one more like accidental exposure, more accurate... analogue of what will happen to rest of population."

* * *

**Remember, fanfictioners love reviews...! it's what makes our hearts leap when we get up in the morning. That and the coffee. If you can't wait for the next update, check out my fic The Memory of Bees, which you can find on my profile. It is unrelated to this universe though!**


	7. Chapter 7

**Hi folks, hope you're enjoying this! Starting to pull all the threads together now. Remember, reviews make the world go round. Actually, the world revolves around reviews, not the sun as some people would have you believe. Sherlock was right all along**

* * *

**Chapter 7**

"Dear God, what is that smell?"

"My experiment." Sherlock shrugged off his coat and hung it on the back of the door. "Count yourself lucky, the liver was far worse." He headed straight for the kitchen and reluctantly tipped his test tube contents down the sink.

"You were pretty hard on Mike back there." John hovered, not taking his coat off just yet.

"Mike's an idiot." Sherlock opened one of the kitchen cupboards and brought out a pint glass. He started to fill it with tap water.

"He was distraught."

"He let a con artist into his department. A con artist who, I might add, murdered the man he was impersonating-"

"Now, slow down, we don't know that for sure-"

"Yes, we do – and has probably abducted Molly," Sherlock allowed himself a small breath of commiseration, "so, yes, he should be distraught." Then he downed the water in one long draught, upturning the glass on the draining board.

"I think I'm going to help with the manhunt," John announced.

"No," Sherlock ripped a page out of his pocket notebook and passed it to him, along with his wallet, "you're going shopping."

"I'm in no mood to go shopping." John looked at the list fleetingly. "What about finding Molly? Are you going to help or not? Don't you care about her at all?" He recalled the pair's lunchtime quarrel. "What am I saying? Of course you don't care."

"I never said I didn't care," he finally retorted, "a man-hunt's just not my biggest priority right now."

"There's something wrong with you." Sherlock's wallet weighed more heavily in John's hand than leather and paper and plastic should. His knuckles whitened at his grasp.

"Never claimed otherwise."

"There's something weird about this whole case and you're not telling me. The moment you knew Molly was missing, something changed. Your whole face changed. We can't let that video be the last time we see her alive, Sherlock. After all she did for you..."

Sherlock hung his head, leaning on the kitchen counter for support. He wouldn't look John in the eye. He stayed like that at the counter for longer than John would allow himself to indulge the man.

"Right, well, I suppose I'm doing the shopping then." He changed his tone to try and somehow call a truce. "What are _you_ going to do?"

"I need to sit here and think." Sherlock crossed to the living room and curled his long legs up under him in his favourite chair. He stared long and hard at the bunch of poppies that Mrs Hudson had put in a Robertson's Marmalade jar with a little bit of water.

John took a deep breath to stop himself doing something unspeakable to the man. He looked at the list again. "Please tell me this is part of a plan."

"All good plans start with shopping."

"Shopping."

"Yes, shopping and… thinking. Thinking and shopping. Now run along."

"But the search, Sherlock-"

"The metropolitan police's modus operandi is to look for a needle in a haystack in the most traditional sense of the phrase. Molly is not a needle and London is not a haystack. Provided she's still in London, that is - she may not be. No, as with a murder, they'd be better off looking for a motive. Go right back to the beginning of the story. How do you really find a needle, John?" John looked blank. "You burn the haystack _DOWN_."

Shopping was already looking like the better option. "Okay. You do some thinking and I'll just… I'm trusting you the burning thing's figurative, then?"

But Sherlock was already deep in thought, squinting at something John couldn't see.

* * *

He looked at the two numbers. One was the fake Barnett's number. _No point_. It was probably a burner anyway. An operation as organised as this wouldn't make the mistake of being traceable by GPS. He spent a second toying with the idea of calling. Even if it was only to give that man a piece of his mind. He replayed the image of Barnett leading Molly off to the museum café. He pictured them sitting down to coffee.

I WANT TO APOLOGISE FOR EARLIER, the message had said. _Fastforward._

He saw Molly slip her bag under the table, just where they'd found it, and sip the coffee. It was probably laced with some of the Valium he'd killed the real Barnett with. It would have taken about 20 minutes to take effect, in which time he would have walked Molly to the conveniently placed ambulance at the back gates of Dominion House, probably under the pretext of talking about her current case work.

No, the story started way before that. It started months ago with an illegal immigration. _Rewind._

_Ticos Floarea_

_ Tarcáu_

_Potoci_

Place names fell through his head.

He narrowed it down a bit.

_ Hamzoaia_

_Bicaz_

_ BICAZ!_

He was standing in a glade in the Carpathian mountains. Tall pines shaded him from the midday sun and a glassy blue lake was visible just beyond the trees. It was breath-taking, like an oasis from the storm in his mind. The slain Romanian girl stood before him, naked. The top of her head, most of the cranium, was missing and there was a livid wound flapping open on her right thigh; the letterbox. Her skin was grey and she stared right in front of her, unseeing.

_This will not do._ He decided to give her some dignity in death. Only God knew if she'd been granted any in her too short life.

He gave her a virginal white dress that billowed in the light breeze, tied at the waist like a Grecian icon. Then he replaced the missing cranium with carefully dressed long dark curls. The colour came back into her cheeks. He decided to let her smile; she deserved to be happy in death.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," she said, only now moving her eyes. Her head turned as she followed his circumnavigation around her.

"It's beautiful. Why did you leave?"

The girl glanced around at the forest. "There were no jobs. They promised me work as an au pair."

"But when you got there it was very different to what they said, wasn't it."

The girl nodded.

"Did that kill you?" He pointed to the wound on her leg.

"No," said the girl.

Molly had been close to finding out what killed her; that was why she was taken, he concluded. Shame he didn't have the notes. The fake Barnett had taken those too. But he did have the next best thing.

Suddenly the dead girl was replaced with Molly, clothed in the classic white dress, her childlike face framed with the romantic pin-curls.

"Hmmm, that's an improvement on your usual attire."

"It's not for you."

"Blunt as ever, I see."

The ghost of a smile crossed her face.

"You removed her brain."

"Yes."

"You did that because phlebotomy and toxicology didn't find anything."

"Is that a question or a statement?" his mind-Molly said cheekily.

He began to circle her slowly, checking he'd imagined her figure correctly.

_32 -24 -34. _

_Hmmm, coincidence?_

"You don't believe in coincidences," Mind-Molly smirked.

"Well observed."

"Do you believe in love at first sight?" she asked without warning.

He cocked his head slightly to one side. "Not now, Molly. I'm trying to solve your murder."

"I haven't been murdered yet."

"We don't know that for sure. That's what's killing..." he had been going to say, 'me'.

"There's this man and I love him," she continued, looking straight forward, "at least, I think I do. I can't stop thinking about him. He's so intelligent it's like he's burning."

"Yes, I do feel like I'm burning." He frowned, quickly falling into the trap. "How could you know that?"

"I see you when you think he's not looking."

Could it be that she was the only one who really saw him? _No, that's not allowed._ His carefully constructed prison of alone must not be compromised again. _You're not allowed in my head this way, Molly. Oh, damn you already are. _She wasn't playing by the rules...

"Back to business," he snapped. "What were you looking for in her brain? Cancer, blood-clot, heavy metals?"

"You're asking the wrong questions," said Mind-Molly and she looked down. Blood started to soak through the dress, approximately in the position of the Romanian girl's leg wound. Then it started to flow freely, completely saturating the exquisite white fabric until it was weighing her down. Mind-Molly's eyelashes fluttered closed and she started to fall backwards, slowly, as if underwater.

He reached out feebly, but she was already plummeting toward the forest floor. Only it wasn't a forest floor now, it was the concrete floor of a warehouse. The blood pooled around her under the harsh floodlights, sticky and clotted at the edges.

"I won't let that happen!" he said to the corpse.

"Then _think_, stupid," a dark suited figure stepped out of the shadows; the devil's advocate.

"I'm _trying_." He turned back to the remains of his Mind-Molly to find that she'd been replaced with the Romanian girl, now lying in state on a mortuary table. The dark suited figure came and stood on the opposite side so that they were both looking down on the naked body.

"It's like a game of Operation isn't it?" said the other man, "you always were a bad loser. Could never stand to be… wrong."

"Oh, piss off Mycroft. You're not welcome in here."

He busied himself with trying every conceivable foreign object that could have been secreted in the girl's wound. It was indeed like a game of Operation.

_Cannabis… too cheap._

_Heroin… Coke… more expensive but still pointless._

_Weapons… Ammunition… too heavy. Also pointless when there were better ways of getting them into the country._

He dismissed them all.

_Something expensive… something worth killing for… Gold… Diamonds… maybe diamonds! But there were no known diamond smuggling operations between eastern Europe and the UK. _

_No __known __operations._

He put that one on the back burner for later.

_More valuable than diamonds… Something electronic…bomb parts?_

"That's absurd," he said to the motionless figure on the table, "is it absurd? Why is it absurd?"

"Because there's nothing you can make a bomb out of that isn't already available here." The dead girl spoke up, getting impatient.

His whole thought process had taken but a few seconds. Sherlock's eyes flew open and he focussed on the makeshift vase of poppies on the coffee table. _Papaver Somnifarum._

"This is no good. I need to consult an expert."

* * *

"You really should apologise, you know."

"And to _whom_ should I be apologising?" Sherlock opened Mrs Hudson's fridge as she bustled around making tea.

"That poor girl," she scolded him, "I heard your raised voices. It's just not gentlemanly. I've a mind to call your Mother. She wouldn't stand for you treating a girl like this."

Sherlock closed the fridge, disappointed. "Have you got any cake?"

"Anyway, I think it's pretty obvious you're both frustrated." Mrs Hudson reached for the milk.

"Anything remotely edible would do. Anything with sugar in it, really." He opened the fridge again and handed her the carton.

"You think I don't know what's going on up there most of the time, young man, but I hear things. I can smell smoke sometimes too, don't you doubt it." She reached for the good cake tin, up on top of the kitchen units. He took it down for her before she did herself a mischief. "And I'm wise enough to know when a woman has been scorned. I know the tone of voice, even through these floorboards."

Sherlock had already partially switched off, sitting down at the small table. "Is this Mr Kipling?" He opened the tin and sniffed the cake.

"And now she's missing, presumed… run off. Probably eloped with that boyfriend of hers, not that you'd care. But all I'm saying is you need to fix it. You need to apologise. And that's all I have to say about that." She plonked the mug of tea roughly in front of him. Some of it sloshed over the edge.

"Mrs Hudson."

"Yes."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"You can, but I can't guarantee you'll like the answer."

"It's about something else."

"Okay, then." Mrs Hudson folded her arms across her chest, still unimpressed with his treatment of Molly.

"It's about smuggling."

"I don't know anything about smuggling."

"Yes you do. Your husband spent thirty five years exporting a mountain of cocaine out of the USA. Of course you know something about smuggling. You couldn't fail to learn something about smuggling." He put some of the fruitcake in his mouth to punctuate the point.

"But I do know something about women and it's obvious she's still sweet on you-"

"Mave you mever meard of momeone miding drugf infide deir dody." Mouth still full of cake, he washed his words down with hot tea.

"Well, of course. The usual ways up the… you know. Inside a… you-know-what." She whispered the last part behind her hand.

"Yes I know about that. What I mean is, actually cutting a cavity in their flesh and sewing something into it."

"Not exactly. But there was a story about a young lady who wrapped up a package of… you know, like a baby and she got away with it too, because no-one would wake a sleeping baby on a plane, would they?"

"I have no idea. What about other things? Not drugs, say… something the size of a radiator pipe."

"Oh, I wouldn't know about anything else… unless-"

"Unless what?"

"Unless you count the Mexicans. They always had very creative ways of getting things out of the country. Very clever. Stealing radioactive material from hospital CAT scanners and selling it on, if you get my meaning. Making a huge profit they were. Only, it wasn't long before some of them started turning up dead in the desert. They just didn't know how to treat the stuff, didn't respect it. They were stuffing it up their jumpers for all we knew. Anyway, Frank always said-"

And that was the point he pretty much tuned her out. _Radioactive material?_ Molly would have found that wouldn't she? There would have been signs of radiation sickness. _Gamma radiation._ That was a standard thing to look for.

_Heavy metals? _

A few bars of subconsciously remembered Iron Maiden played in his head.

_Don't be silly!_

_Lead…? Too obvious, idiot._

_Bismuth?_

His game of life sized 'Operation' returned. A rod of Bismuth floated above cavity in the corpse. He rejected it.

Back to radioactive elements.

_Plutonium?_

_Neptunium _

_Uranium _

_ProtactiniumThoriumActiniumRadiumFrancium… _

_All Gamma Radiation…_

_Radon, Astatine, Polonium, Promethium…_

_Wait, Polonium? POLONIUM! _

Polonium 210 emitted alpha particles only. There would be no gamma radiation to detect, but it would cause massive cell death on close proximity or contact.

A rod of polonium 210 spun around in mid-air, became coated in a more innocuous metal and inserted itself into the cavity in the Romanian girl.

_Perfect!_ It was valuable enough to want to hide; it was something you couldn't risk being found on your person or in a lorry, and most importantly, it was something that could poison you in an almost undetectable way. Almost undetectable because you had to know what you were looking for before you started looking. He would know.

His mental map zoomed in on the former soviet states, source of most of the world's Polonium.

Polonium, Romania, dead girls…

The picture was complete. It all made sense now.

Yes!

No.

NO!

Polonium 210. No…

He took his favourite pencil out of his pocket and held it at arm's length, between finger and thumb.

Mrs Hudson was just finishing her own cup of tea, saying, "you both need to just get it out in the open, admit you have feelings for-"

"Mrs Hudson!" Sherlock scraped his chair back violently. "Pack a bag and go to your sister's. Don't ask any questions, just go! Get as far away from London as you can, and don't come back til I tell you. Don't touch me!"

She was uncomprehending.

He looked at the half full mug and the cake tin, his breath coming fast and he swallowed hard. "Do you trust me?"

"Y – yes, of course I do, sweetheart. What's wrong?"

"Something very bad. Worse than anyone imagined."

* * *

**Mind-Molly's words come from her blog. Check it out here... www. mollyhooper. co. uk/**

**John's blog... www. johnwatsonblog. co. uk/**

**Sherlock's blog... www. thescienceofdeduction. co. uk/**


	8. Chapter 8

**First of all thanks to all my readers for the overwhelming support and the lovely comments. You know who you are! Secondly, an apology to all those who are dying of suspense, because it's not going to be resolved this chapter... Sorry! Before we can carry on with the story there needs to be a flashback.**

**Theme music for this chapter is Sarah McLachlan's_ 'Ice'._ Even if you're not a fan, the lyrics are incredible and very relevant. **

**www. youtube watch? v=yrbGEVilpsI**

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Chapter 8

_I don't like your tragic sighs, _  
_As if your god has passed you by._

_Well, hey fool, that's your deception. _

_Your angels speak with jilted tongues. _  
_The serpent's tale has come undone._

_You have no strength to squander..._

* * *

The rain beat down relentlessly on the corrugated tin roof. In another life the endless grayness of this land would have reminded him of London, but now there was only a shadow of a memory left.

His old life was all but forgotten. When had that happened? Somewhere between losing his supplies when he fled the hotel in Prague and here, a backwater town in the hill country of Albania. He'd lost contact with the MI6 handler not long after the escape. He was probably dead. He'd never even known the man's real name.

Yellowed fingers with ragged nails stubbed out the cigarette on the wall, familiar, yet still somehow a stranger's fingers. He stared at his own hands trying to remember.

_London._

He still had a map of her in there somewhere… in the back of his mind. He'd need it when he went back. _If_ he ever went back. But for the time being there was only the taste of raw unfiltered tobacco and the knowledge that someone, _someone_ in this pub knew where to find Baron Maupertuis.

It was one of those rustic, unlicensed places you saw all over Eastern Europe, with the makeshift melamine bar and the pot of _gjellë_ bubbling ominously on a brazier in the corner. He was sitting on one of the eclectic collection of chairs, each one whitewashed to varying degrees of distress.

They didn't like strangers here, and this kept him on alert as he looked around.

_"Më falni."_ He gestured to the plain, Greek-looking girl acting as a barmaid to bring food. She probably wasn't from around here either. He spoke in broken Albanian and wished, not for the first time, that his polyglot of a brother was here. Albanian was difficult to master, not having much in common with most modern languages. The girl brought some of the _gjellë _in a chipped bowl that looked like it had been looted from the Italians in about 1941. She took way his glass. The thin stew was hot and sustaining, but not what anyone would call tasty. He thanked the powers that be that it did not contain any of the intestines or head of the animal as he wolfed it down. Pieces of capsicum and what looked like onions floated to the top.

He ran a hand through his mop of overgrown hair.

Over in the corner a weathered old man, a farmer, huddled over his own bowl of stew. The deep lines on his face said sixty but he couldn't have been more than forty-five. The exposure and the hardship did that to people around here. He remembered John once telling him that soldier's faces changed, starting out fresh and young and eager, and then drew out over the duration of their tour, until the stress and sand and sun left the indelible mark of their experiences. Rougher skin. Deeper frowns, sadder eyes. So much death. He wondered if his own face had changed much under its stubble and dirt. The last eighteen months had taken a harsh toll on his body and his soul. Such a terrible, terrible price for freedom and the lives of those he cared about.

_No, don't say that_... Those he _loved._

People who may never know what he'd done for them.

And the only thing that had kept him going on those lonely nights, huddled in foreign bus stations and under bridges, was the thought of a girl he once knew. Pretty and warm and kind and clever. And so, so brave. Someone who hadn't thought twice about risking everything to save his life, even if it turned out he wasn't everything she thought he was. Even if everyone else thought he was a fake, a charlatan. She'd believed in him when no-one else would. _Tell me what's wrong,_ she'd said, _tell me what you need._

Who was he that he deserved such kindness and trust, when all that he was, all that he'd done was stripped away?

_You're wrong, you know, you do count, _he'd told her to assuage any doubt_, you've always counted and I've always trusted you. _It was with a heavy heart that he'd left the safety of her home and set out on this mission with a new identity. But that hadn't been the end of her involvement; he'd taken a piece of her with him. She'd never know that it was her image, the delightful eccentricity of her ways, and the faintly recalled scent of her neck as he leaned down to kiss her cheek, that had kept him alive all this time. She represented everything that was soft and comfortable and hopeful; the opposite of this God-forsaken place.

She _was_ hope.

She was _home_.

One day, if he survived this piece of the puzzle, he would thank her properly.

He drained the last of the stew and pushed the bowl away, preparing to leave the table. The weathered old man caught his eye. He paid the barmaid with pick-pocketed coins, flicked the hood of the purloined rain-coat over his frizzy head and made his move.

* * *

The rain had abated to little more than a blanket of drizzle. He was thankful for that small wonder, at least. The young boy walking the bicycle hadn't noticed him yet. That was surprising, seeing as his fatigue had stripped away any grace he might have once had in covert pursuit. He hung back, keeping to the shelter of the alleys between the roughly rendered houses, staggering occasionally, trying to appear intoxicated.

The boy's bicycle carried packages of groceries in its panniers, along with a delivery from the local pharmacy in a large paper bag.

He watched as the delivery boy carried on up the hill to the more affluent part of town. It was less of a road and more of a dirt track, really. Civilisation hadn't reached far into this part of the country; the legacy of a communist ruler. Above them a mountain pass disappeared into the mist.

When the boy turned a corner into a more open part of the street, he hung back even further, kicking a stray chicken out of the way to hide behind a sign and pulling the hood down even further over his face. They were approaching an incongruous row of mansions, out of keeping with the overall image of the town. They sprang up all over the Balkans when certain types of people saw fit to exploit the low position of their fellow men. Former warlords, money-lenders, people-traffickers, drug dealers, the scum of the earth. They profited from other people's misery and they built these palaces with the spoils.

The delivery boy turned into what was now known to be Maupertuis' drive and left the bike on the gravel. The shiny Mercedes van parked there was a harsh contrast with the dirt road and the general squalor of the farming community.

He found a hiding place on the other side of the street and waited for dusk.

* * *

"I've been waiting for you."

A blood-pressure monitor beeped steadily beside the bedridden old man, showing the intruder he was not afraid. The nurse-come-housekeeper was passed out in the kitchen from the sleeping pills he'd dissolved in her nightly tot of _rakia_. He's spiked the bottle before the delivery boy had even picked up the groceries. There was no-one else in the dark house to disturb them.

"You know who I am?" He approached the bed, coming out of the shadows. The room was spare, save for a cabinet to keep the medical supplies in and the commode chair. These men knew how to build these magnificent houses, yet they didn't know what to fill them with when they had them.

_Absolutely no class_.

"You are the ghost," came the old man's rasping breath, "the one who has been systematically dismantling our happy family." Maupertuis lifted a feeble, paper-thin hand from the covers.

Yes, he was a ghost. He didn't know who he was any more, not really. He was just an apparition that walked the earth, visiting justice upon the iniquitous, those who could not otherwise be touched. That's why they allowed him to do this mission. They knew he would be able to find those who hide because he knew how to hide. He knew how to forget himself and give himself wholly to the task at hand, even though it may cost him his life. Though it may cost him much more than his life.

"I know why you are here," Maupertuis continued, "but as you can see, I do not need an angel of death."

"Yes, indeed I am the angel of death, come to rain down fire on everything you've spent your life to build." His eyes flashed in the half light and his teeth bared in spite. "I will make it quick."

The old man started to cough and sieze up in spasms. For a moment he thought his target would expire before he had the chance to finish it, but as he watched, the man put his hand to his curling mouth and squeezed a tear from one eye. He was not dying but laughing.

"There is no escape this time, Baron."

Maupertuis recovered from his fit. "May I at least know the name of my assassin, before he dispatches me?"

"Sherlock." He ceremoniously removed the hood. "Sherlock Holmes."

"There is a creature in Greek mythology called the Hydra. When you cut off its head, ten more will grow in its place. You cannot stop this, Sherlock Holmes, you cannot stop the revolution to turn the world into chaos. When you kill the father, the son will rise."

"You said 'family'," Sherlock spat, "you're not a family. I know what a family does... is like."

"We all have the same values. We all have the same vision for the future. Although the rest of the world may not agree with how we want it to be."

"You mean a world where millions of innocent women and children are enslaved by a network of criminal enterprises? A world where terrorists are free to roam across our borders and target whoever they wish? A world where people like James Moriarty are free to manipulate the media, the government and even the lives of private citizens, who never asked to be involved, their lives devastated and left in ruins-"

Maupertuis raised his voice, "a world where people are free to amuse and abuse themselves as they see fit! With any substance they choose! Where do you think it all comes from? I know an addict when I see one. "

Sherlock shrank back a little as the words hit home. He felt the unwelcome jolt of electricity in his own veins, as they cried out. _It was only a little… to help with the pain._

He saw the vials. He saw the cannula in Maupertuis' arm. Then he got himself under control.

"For your crimes," he said, evenly, "you will no longer be allowed to choose your own destiny; you will die tonight."

"One thing," Maupertuis cried out, "allow me one thing."

"A last request?" Sherlock raised one eyebrow under the mop.

"Will you put the record on, uh, over there…"

Sherlock moved over to the cabinet where a small record player sat, already loaded with a vinyl single of Aretha Franklin. He started it and put the needle in the groove.

"Any last words? I can't guarantee I'll remember them, or that anyone will care."

"You may be able to leave here intact Mr Holmes, but I will be avenged, that is for certain. You will not be able to escape. The name Maupertuis will haunt you to your grave."

"Too late," said Sherlock, filling a syringe, "haven't you heard? I'm already dead."

Aretha sang 'Never Let Me Go' and the old man's eyes flickered back into his skull as Sherlock delivered a massive overdose of Morphine into his drip.

_All lives end_, he reflected, as he checked the old man's pulse, just to be sure.

* * *

Up went the hood and out went the assassin. Back into the rain. There was no time to add Maupertuis' condition to his observations about the state of human decay; he had taken what he wanted from the house, antibiotics and various pieces of paperwork, and now he would vanish into the forest. In two weeks he would cross the border in the national park and he would be in Kosovo. Shortly after that he would reach Serbia.

There was one last lead to check before he could go home.

* * *

**Thanks for persevering. Slight delay in updating due to family illness. **


	9. Chapter 9

**Hi folks! Hope you're all having a good week. Broke down a couple of days ago and broke my personal vow to not watch my Sherlock DVD until Christmas. Always a bad idea. I loaned it to a friend and they asked if they could pass it on to another friend for the time being, and I was like *lip trembles* 'actually, I think I'll just have it back...' and they were having none of it. Got into a physical fight over a DVD. The addiction is strong with this one.**

**This chapter turned out a lot different to what I planned, chiefly because when I got inside John's head he just ran away with it, and now it's a lot more introspective and less action. Now the plot and the Sherlolly have taken a slightly different direction and have developed sooner than I intended. Hope it doesn't mess it up too much.**

* * *

**Chapter nine**

Sherlock had somehow inserted himself into his dream. How had that happened? It was a bit disturbing.

John got off the tube at South Kensington. He emerged from the Thurloe Street gates, checking the list, and headed for Imperial College. It was rush hour and a throng bustled about; patrons leaving the museums, night shoppers heading for Picadilly, lonely girls and boys returning from work, respecting one another's urban solitude.

The dream had given him – oh, how he hated to admit it - the heebie-jeebies. Why did he feel like he was being watched? He hadn't even done anything illegal. Yet. How did he get into these situations, anyway? Oh, he knew, really. It was because he couldn't resist the adventure of it. And he couldn't resist Sherlock Holmes, curse him.

He'd been behaving rather strangely today. Strange for Sherlock, anyway. He probably didn't realise it, but he made a weird face each time Molly was mentioned. Sort of afraid. Sort of confused. John had seen it only once before. No wonder Sherlock resisted all forms of emotion; he was off his game. He could never win a game of poker when he was feeling…

And then it hit him like a locomotive as he was pressing the button for the traffic lights.

_Shit. He's actually gone and fallen for her, the sodding muppet._

This could be really bad.

_Nah, don't be ridiculous. What was it Sherlock said all the time? Preposterous!_ He didn't have time for that sort of thing. Sentiment gets in the way of pure, cold logic. Apparently. But then there was the thing earlier, Molly fleeing the scene of the crime, upset, and Sherlock being all imperious and claiming she'd propositioned him. If the crime was a broken heart, he could understand that.

_Really,_ _Molly darling, don't you even know the meaning of 'playing hard to get'?_

They'd also been spending a lot more time together since John got married. In a way it was his own fault if Sherlock needed someone to fill his shoes and they'd been thrown together.

Damn. He should have seen this coming. That awful, icky moment when Molly introduced Tom.

And then there was the Molly helping Sherlock fake his own death thing. The first thing he'd done after Sherlock's return – well, not the _first_ thing he'd done; the real first thing he'd done was to lock himself in the bedroom and down half a bottle of scotch – but the first actual thing he'd done was to go and give Molly Hooper a piece of his mind. Mary begged him not to go, _leave her alone_, she'd said, _poor girls been through enough already_.

He'd paced the flat for a whole day before they'd ended up going to her flat and waiting on the front step for her to get back from her running club. Mary had held his hand the whole time. When Molly had finally returned, wearing a hi-vis vest against the dark, she'd found an extremely unsettled man waiting for her. Her friends made faces, jogged off reluctantly, but she'd reassured them. She knew why he was there.

She'd brought them inside, silently making a cup of tea, and John remembered thinking, _she's taking this well, very dignified._ But apparently, Sherlock had already been to see her and prepared her for the fact that '_John knew and he wasn't very happy'_.

It felt like a conspiracy against his heart.

So she'd calmly explained why she'd done what she had to do, and why she'd lied to him all this time and let him drift out of her life. And John had explained, _not_ very calmly, what he'd been through in the last two years and that she could have prevented him all that. And he'd asked, _how, for the love of God, had she gotten through the funeral, and were the tears real, and was anything fucking real anymore?_

Mary had sat on the sofa, her hands folded in her lap and stayed very quiet through the whole thing, until she'd put a hand on his arm and told him to calm down and stop '_shouting at the poor woman in her own home'_. And by the end of it, John was crying and Molly was crying, and she was _soooo sorry, what could she ever do to make it up to him_, and he'd admitted he wasn't exactly proud of the way he'd conducted himself that evening, and he'd eventually forgiven her and told her about the engagement.

But all through that evening, the way she talked, the way she hadn't even batted an eyelid at risking so much for a man who was, essentially, a bastard to her for most of their relationship, told John that it wasn't just a silly infatuation, it was real.

It. Was. _Real_.

It would hardly be surprising if something developed from this. Hardly surprising if it was a _normal_ person they were talking about. It wasn't like Sherlock didn't get offers. But John couldn't understand how someone could deny themselves sleep, food and sex for so long. It was practically superhuman_. Talk about blue balls. The man's gonads must be fucking turquoise by now._

But there was no denying it; if anyone could find the chinks in his armour, it was her. When he was around Molly he was a good man. He was human. He was actually nice to the clients for Christ's sake. But he wasn't at peak performance. This was bad news for the world.

The thought of Sherlock and Molly 'together' just didn't sit right in his heart. Okay, they were perfect for each other but he knew Sherlock; he had the capacity to _destroy _her. Not deliberately; it was just that these women didn't understand that you couldn't save an addict, you couldn't just fix them.

_Him._

You can't just fix Sherlock Holmes.

_What to do? _

He wouldn't know until they found her. If they ever found her. He hoped to God that they did, or that the police did, because judging by the whole Adler affair, if something happened to Molly, someone he actually cared about, Sherlock would be out of control. He wasn't willing to watch the man go through that again, destroy himself and possibly something or someone else.

No, he wouldn't let it go that far. He would take it upon himself to find Molly, even if no-one else could. That much he felt he could do for his friends. And then he would do everything in his power to make sure this 'thing' between them never happened. Such a tragic dichotomy. It was the reverse of the vow that Sherlock had made when he married Mary; John promised to never let them find each other.

Sometimes you had to break someone's heart to save them.

_This plan had better bloody work, Sherlock._

He checked the shopping list again when he turned into Exhibition Road. It said,

'Kai Chung Hsieh, Chemistry Dept. Imperial College, owes me for the Phenakistoscope and he's expecting you. 3kg Fe2O3 powder, 1kg Al metal powder, 1kg Ba(NO3)2, powder…'

And a few other things.

_Ah, here it is. I remember. _He approached the car park cautiously; there were red and white barriers and a bus stop, but relatively few people loitering around. Crisp, brown leaves swirled around in a breeze, disappearing into the unlit portions of the street.

The entrance to the Chemistry department was flanked by two statues, colossi of the scientific community. Imposing old limestone buildings were spaced with shiny new blocks of architecture. John almost felt nostalgic for his time as a cadet at the University of London, although he'd studied biology, not chemistry.

Hsieh had been waiting for him in the foyer, wringing his hands. Obviously doing business with Sherlock was nerve wracking.

"Doctor Watson." The guy shook his hand. John noticed that it was still clammy from nerves. He unconsciously wiped his hand on his jeans.

"So, do you teach here, or…?"

"Technician."

"Ah. Got you."

Hsieh led him down a corridor and through a door that he unlocked with a large bunch of keys from his lab coat pocket. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it in broad view of everyone in the building. John had plenty of practice at trying not to look furtive, but he still would have been more comfortable doing this under cover of darkness. He watched Hsieh, a slight young man, with the mannerisms of someone with a lifelong dislike of social interaction, unlock the door to a lab full of fume cupboards. Beyond this room was a storeroom with a hazardous chemicals warning symbol on it.

They looked at the list together.

Hsieh busied himself fetching the requested chemicals from the shelves. John's arms were soon straining under the weight of several 5kg drums of powdered metals. They proceeded to one of the benches in the lab where Hsieh silently weighed out what Sherlock needed.

"You don't talk much, do you?" John was naturally distrustful of quiet people. You never knew what they were thinking. He wondered about the exact circumstances in which Sherlock had met this guy, and what exactly a Phenakistoscope was. He drummed his fingers on the plastic lid of the Barium Nitrate.

Hsieh snapped the lid on the last container and labelled it with a Sharpie. "What's he making this time? Because these are all the ingredients for TH3."

"I don't-" John stopped himself. "Wait. TH3, as in Thermate?"

Hsieh nodded, unconcerned, scribbling on the container.

"As in, what's in grenades?"_Christ, Sherlock, what are you up to?_

"He said you're a doctor." Hsieh was confused.

"An _army_ doctor."

"So you've seen what this stuff can do."

"I'm not sure I should give it to him now."

Hsieh stopped what he was doing and turned to John, a benevolent look on his face. "Don't worry. Sherlock Holmes is always in control."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

"You're his friend. Trust him. Hmmm?"

"Says a fellow chemist who's not averse to breaking the law."

Hsieh just smiled and held up his hands.

John sighed and gave in. He'd made a personal commitment to saving Molly and if this was part of the plan, he'd have to go along with it. "Is there a back door to this place?"

"No. You go out the front door. Less suspicious this way. Have you ever read Edgar Allan Poe?"

"Hiding in plain sight."

"You got it." Hsieh winked and fetched an empty copy-paper box from the rubbish bin.

* * *

_Five years._

She'd known him for five years now. A crush didn't last five years, did it? If you subscribed to the belief that love was a disease or, as Sherlock put it, _'an involuntary state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation'_ , she'd be over it by now. She'd been through the incubation period; two years of infatuation. She'd survived two years, _almost_, of his absence. He'd been back for a year now and - _who was she kidding?_ - he was still all she thought about.

He was all she'd thought about while she'd been here in this living hell, with the noise of all the people coming and going, and the laughing and the screaming and the grunting. The occasional bang on the locked door of her cell. The cable ties cutting into her ankles and wrists.

Wade came in to check on her again. He lit up in the corner, like he always did. "Still not dead yet?"

She made little coughing noises to try and make a point.

"Emphysema's the least of your worries right now, sweetheart."

She stopped. "I see you haven't developed a conscience yet."

"And you haven't developed Stockholm syndrome yet. I was so looking forward to spending some quality time together." He took a drag on the cigarette.

"What's your interest in Sherlock Holmes," she asked.

Wade raised an eyebrow and blew smoke in her direction, not intending to answer any time soon.

"Back in the hospital you said you didn't want him coming there anymore. It's plausible enough… If you were the real Barnett. But you're not, so what's the deal? Somehow you knew that if he was told to stay away, the first thing he would do is come and see what all the fuss was about. It's quite simple reverse psychology."

He finally peeled himself off the wall and stood over her. "It's not me, it's Jokic. Some misguided vendetta, consuming him, making him sloppy. See hate is just as bad of a distraction as love. Love betrays people to their death. Hate betrays people too."

"So, what is this, your Bond-baddie monologue?"

"You mistake me for someone who matters. As dear Jokic told you before, I am just a pawn, like you."

"So I'm the bait?"

"Sure looks that way, darlin'"

"You've made a mistake. I think you're over estimating my importance in all of this. I'm not important to Sherlock."

He'd proved it this morning when he'd raised his voice. He'd never done that before… Her body still winced at the thrill of his voice reverberating through her. If he was burning when he was being smart then he was _incandescent_ when he was angry. It only served to make her love him more, scars and all.

What the hell was wrong with her? She was like a psychopath groupie or something.

Her love for him was a scar on her heart that would never heal. It eclipsed everything else in her life, including Tom. It would always be there, like background radiation, blighting all their lives.

And now, if her theory was correct, it was her love for him that would actually get her killed.

"What's _your_ interest in Sherlock Holmes?" Wade almost read her thoughts.

"None," she said, turning her face away from his falling ash, "absolutely none at all."

"Oh, it's like that is it? Do you realise you wear your heart on your sleeve?"

"If you were any good at reading people, you'd realise he's not that interested in me." She felt hot tears threaten for the first time since the drugs had worn off.

"But what you didn't know, is that we've been watching you both for a while now, looking for a way in."

The thought of wade or even Jokic spying on her interactions with Sherlock made her feel sick to the stomach. What had they seen? What had they done that made a stranger interpret it _that_ way? If these guys could see it, then could everyone else? Was Tom with his jealousy just mirroring what everyone else was thinking? "He's not going to fall for this, you know. He's too clever for that. He's not coming for me. That's the truth."

"Aw, poor little martyr," he mocked, "willing to go to the grave for the man she loves. Shame there's no glory in that."

"I don't do any of this for recognition."

"Ah, that's right. If it's any consolation, the real Lawrence Barnett was a nice man. He wouldn't have given you a bawling out like that. Too bad you'll never know how that would have panned out. You know, he didn't even put up that much of a fight. You'd think a doctor would place a lot more value on his own life."

"You're sick."

"No, sweetheart. You're the one who's _sick_. Now, enough of this claptrap, I'm going to have some fun." And with one last flick of the cigarette, he was locking the door behind him.

They'd made a grave mistake. Sherlock wasn't a hero. There were no heroes in this life, no knights on white horses to coming to rescue her. Partly she was glad to think that he wouldn't fall into so blatant a trap. Partly she was already mourning herself.

There would be no close family at her funeral. There was a great aunt, Helene, somewhere up north. They didn't speak. All she knew about Aunt Hel was that she'd given her a hand knitted teddy bear when she was born. Her friends would be there, of course, Mike and Caroline and Meena and her boyfriend Niven. and Rebecca from school. John and Mary would mourn her. Martha Hudson too.

There were so many things she hadn't done with her life. She wanted to feel the sun flickering through groves of verdant beech trees as she drove to Glastonbury in June. She wanted to feel the sand between her toes down in Hove like she did when she was a kid. She wanted to taste one more Hummingbird cupcake. She wanted to feel the unashamed, warm wet flourish of arousal for the man that she loved.

_NO!_

All her life she'd had to do everything for herself. Anything she wanted, she'd gotten. No-one had ever told her that she couldn't do something because she was a woman. She'd never had to rely on anyone else and that wasn't going to change now.

_To hell with this… I'm going to live!_

And she pulled on the restraints once more with renewed vigor.

* * *

**Apologies to everyone who's following this as I'm not going to be updating for another two weeks now... got a website to design for a regular client. But rest assured, there will be some HUGE twists and shocks coming up! Mwa-ha-ha-ha! *strokes white cat***

**Check out my profile for info on how this story and the trilogy will progress.**


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